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Campaign season has apparently officially started. Ari Fleischer spent more time answering questions about Bush’s campaign yesterday than he spent on anything else, including this little gem:

Q Secondly, on fundraising. Governor Dean has said that it’s a threat to democracy for any one presidential candidate to have two or three times more money to get his or her message out than any other candidate. Regardless of how much money the President plans to raise, does he see any merit whatsoever in that argument?

MR. FLEISCHER: Well again, I think the amount of money that candidates raise in our democracy is a reflection of the amount of support they have around the country. So the President is proud to have the support of the American people, and the American people will ultimately be the ones who decide how much funding goes to any Democrat or any Republican.

I love typing that. I’m gonna type it again: “I think the amount of money that candidates raise in our democracy is a reflection of the amount of support they have around the country.”

The more money you raise, the more support you have. If you’re supported by a lot of poor people, but not many rich people — well, support from poor people just doesn’t count as much.

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Charlie Stross draws comparisons between the museum losses in Baghdad and hypothetical losses of equal scale in London.

Imagine London bombed. The V&A trashed, the Tower of London and the Crown Jewels looted, the British Library complex on Euston Road burned (along with all those annoying old bits of paper like the original draft of Magna Carta, the Gutenberg Bible, and so on), the Natural History Museum used as a defensive fortification and shelled. (Goodbye, Apollo 10.)

Teresa Nielsen Hayden also has an excellent summary of where we are right now, generously supplemented by commentary on the Free Republic crowd and Andrew Sullivan.

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I always wanted to know which states had lots of people with my last name. I just didn’t know it till I found this link. There are few of my kind anywhere, except there’s a cluster in Maine, which is completely expected. There’s also a cluster in Oregon, which doesn’t surprise me in the least cause I already knew about that branch.

French names cluster in New England and Louisana. Scandanavian names cluster up in the Dakotas and Wisconsin and Minnesota. Cool stuff. (Via http://www.gtexts.com/blog/archives/00000075.htmlgtexts.)